The Cerro Oak

The town is named after this tree, and the tree is not quite what the name says. Cerro Veronese sits on the Lessinia plateau about fifteen kilometres north of Verona and takes its name from the cerro in the square beside the parish church. The municipality then drew it. The coat of arms is that oak on a red field, roots showing in the earth, a silver cross above the crown. What is actually standing there is a cerro-sughera, Quercus crenata, the natural hybrid of the Turkey oak, which Italian calls cerro, and the cork oak, sughera. The hybrid is nowhere common and does not breed true, so most specimens are one-offs rather than a population. You can read both parents off the trunk and the leaves: bark thickening toward the cork oak's spongy layer, and shallow rounded teeth all round the leaf margin, which hang on into winter instead of dropping cleanly. Italy's own national register of monumental trees has measured it: 375 centimetres round and 17.5 metres tall, at 722 metres of altitude in the piazza itself. Local tourism and parish sources round the same tree to about four metres and call it over three centuries old, and nobody publishes a firmer figure than that, so the age stays a wide band. It stands between the church and the parish theatre, free to walk up to at any hour.